Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

82 • Maneuver Forces: The Army and Marine Corps After Iraqin most cases. In this environment, actions to disenfranchise, disarm, dishearten anddemoralize the Islamist terrorist and his potential recruits promise to achieve moresuccess than brute force.This is why the idea that hundreds of thousands of conventional American combattroops with some combination of better counterinsurgency tactics and massive economicinvestment could create a Western-style democratic nation-state where noneexists in Iraq or Afghanistan was delusional. It ignored the fact that the foundationfor liberal democratic institutions in the rump of Germany under Allied control wasalready in place before U.S. forces occupied it in 1945. German reconstruction afterWorld War II was an exercise in Allied supervision of re-emergent indigenous Germaninstitutions of self-government and economic development that predated Hitlerby over 150 years. 5 In Japan, the U.S. occupation authorities worked within a similarpre-existing institutional framework legitimated by the Japanese emperor and reinforcedthrough the deliberate U.S. restoration of control of the Japanese economy in1947 to pre-war Japanese business and political interests. 6Thus, trying to export democracy at gunpoint with masses of U.S. ground troopsis delusional. Large conscript ground forces are rarely well-trained or effectively commanded,and although capable of great carnage, it’s often the ground forces themselves,in the form of half-trained and ill-led troops that blunder into war’s meat grinder. Thiswas often the case in both World Wars, in Korea and Vietnam. And Americans haveseen some of the same behavior in Iraq. In fact, unless American military occupationforces are prepared to slaughter the occupied peoples in the style of the Romanlegions or the Mongol armies, Western armies in developing countries will always failto overpower what is fundamentally a historically conditioned, internal, bottom-up,self-organizing evolutionary, cultural process: nation-building. 7These points suggest that intervention in so-called failed states is usually counterproductive.Unless the failure presents a direct security threat to U.S. and alliedinterests, intervention is an opportunity to waste blood and treasure on the scale seenin Iraq and not much more. The American military experience in Southwest Asiaargues against the kind of brute force employed in Iraq. Actions to disenfranchise,disarm, dishearten and demoralize the terrorist and his potential recruits offer farbetter means to overcome this enemy than brute force whether it comes in the formof massive air strikes or large conventional forces.None of these insights make predicting when and where Army and Marine forceswill fight any easier. The truth is history is littered with wars nobody thought wouldhappen.For instance, a sudden North Korean meltdown is a real possibility that woulddemand the rapid occupation of North Korea by forces from the Republic of Korea.U.S. ground forces might well be needed to sortie into the collapsing communist statein order to secure control of its nuclear facilities, an operation that might well include